Developing Coping Skills in the Early Years: A Positive Educational Approach

Abstract

AbstractThere are numerous ways to construe positive education in the early years, particularly as it relates to wellbeing and positive emotional outcomes. The teaching of coping skills provides tools for wellbeing within a positivist framework through emphasising the use of productive coping strategies and reducing the use of unhelpful, non-productive strategies. This chapter provides an example of teaching coping skills in early childhood: the Early Years Coping Project. The project helped young children articulate and understand coping constructs and provided tools to help parents and teachers to assess children’s coping. Visual tools facilitated the development of children’s coping skills in classroom activities. Parents were encouraged to develop their parenting skills and their own coping, utilising the emotion and coping language that is common to them and their children. The parent program was subsequently adapted in a format that was readily communicated to a culturally diverse population, using the generic frameworks and constructs of coping. Coping concepts and constructs have subsequently been incorporated into a COPE-Resilience curriculum. We highlight several applications and extensions of the curriculum. Coping skills provide a template for healthy social-emotional development that can be utilised in different contexts throughout life.